Right Wing Social Revolution and Its Discontent: the Dynamics of Genocide: A Case Study

By Leslie Herzberger

The history of the United States in the last thirty years, its preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the devastating affects of that war on the psyche of this nation is evidence of a foreign policy tragedy. Foreign policy tragedy brings domestic tragedy in its wake. The purpose of this study is to work out why the approaches to social revolution--and that is what the Vietnam War was about--have been wrong on both sides of the ideological spectrum the last thirty years in the U.S., point out why they were wrong, point to where they were wrong, and point to the consequences of acting in a society when the perceptions are in certain respects wrong.

Let me sum up my perception on what went wrong in Vietnam. It was a Right wing war fought on Left wing premises. It was a war that could not have been won because those who designed it would not or could not win it--but were also afraid of losing it. It was a war that was wrongly perceived by both sides of the ideological spectrum.



The Liberal argument was that America tried everything and still lost it!

The Conservative argument was that it could have been won if the opposition had not tied their hands, keeping them from an all out effort that would have been required to win it.

The war was started in earnest by the Liberals under Kennedy. The strategy was to roll up the enemy by hitting on the peasant and through it, cut off the leaders. Pacification, education, re-education, indoctrination, and the introduction of self-defense techniques to the South Vietnamese peasants was meant to stop the revolution exported from the North in its tracks. The U.S. policy was predicated on the assumption that the peasants really had something to do with the ruling functions of the North Vietnamese revolution after Thermidor; that after the onset of Thermidor--after the institutionalization of the revolution--in Hanoi, the revolution was still revolution.



The Liberal approach has believed that revolution is tantamount to Maos view of it in China--peasants all immersed in the revolutionary process as fish in the sea. And so you would have to drain the very ocean itself to stop it. Our approach to the post revolutionary process is that after the onset of Thermidor in a society, revolution is a bunch of terror informed super bureaucrats at the center of a society increasingly cut off from the periphery.

In a post revolutionary society, it is the leaders that matter--not the fish in the sea. So bombing the small fish into fish soup hell in response--as did the West in Vietnam in that war--every tree, every outhouse, every shack, and every village, until they drop so much ordinance that the entire region is brain dead from defoliants and pockmarks and natural calamities, while leaving the center untouched, would seem insane. Yet that was the policy in Vietnam of America. And then nothing happened! Nothing happened week after week, year after year except that America itself was being driven mad doing the same thing, and expecting it to come out different. That, as the President-elect said in 1993, was and is insanity.


But what choice did they all have? The pro-war liberal American leadership that designed the war in Vietnam did not dare bomb Hanoi, the capitol of North Vietnam, for fear of triggering World War III with Red China and with Soviet Russia--both of whose client North Vietnam was. So they tied their own hands, figuring that by coming through the back door, fish in the sea style, piece by piece, nobody will notice in China and Russia; ergo no World War III. So they took a strategy that was insane, and made a virtue out of its necessity. They tied their own hand! And then they blamed the opposition for forcing them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. On the other h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 21, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469100012

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

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Copyright © 2006 by Leslie Herzberger.

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Contents

Introduction

Book I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

BOOK II

PART I

BOOK III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter II:

Chapter III

Conclusion

END NOTES

The old specter returns. Anti-Semitism, the offspring of unbridled religion and nationalism, is working the fringes of the new politics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Superpatriots from Pamyat terrify the Jews of Moscow with rumors of a pogrom. Rightists campaigning in the Hungarian elections made coded attacks on cosmopolitans and daubed walls with the Arrow Cross of fascism. In Romania, old cranks from the Iron Guard—Nazi henchmen in World War II—hope for a comeback. Fanatics in Poland, the furnace of the Holocaust, know how to practice anti-Semitism even without Jews. It would be dangerous to ignore these people. We can’t forget, says Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, that Hitler and his thugs started in the beer halls of Germany" (Newsweek, May 7, 1990).

Introduction

Radical Nationalism And Social Revolution

The disintegration—even the perception of disintegration—of one’s social group always threatens the members of that group. It tends to bring populism and revived nationalism and patriotism to the forefront, spearheaded by those in the population more immediately threatened. Eventually, these are joined by those less volatile, if the threat remains and grows.

The internal threat of disintegration and the external threat from imperialization—due to internal weaknesses—create an exacerbated threat orientation on the part of the more fearful, more violent, more volatile members within a society. This process gives rise to a growing nationalism in the society—meant to reinvigorate the group through raised efforts and impulses. The function of a radicalizing nationalism is an emotional, all-out effort to shape up the group—in order to save it—on the part of its threatened members. It means the mobilization and purification of the society vis-a-vis its enemies within and abroad! A heightened radical nationalism is from the Right.

II

On the Far Right, mobilization and purification is an instinctive response. This process is begun by gearing up a society—what the Nazis in Germany in 1933 called Gleischaltauung,—by purifying the society of its enemies, of its corrupters (both racial and ideological), and by unifying the rest under a single in-group banner as one organic collective in the face of what is perceived as an extremely powerful threat. The threat to the far Right threat is intangible; it is nevertheless perceived as real, requiring an equally emphatic, if not more emphatic response on the part of the group.

An intangible threat to a society’s culture and values—that is actually at the root of the problem of the emotional nationalist, the superpatriot, and the martyr—cannot be fought on a single level, or in a single tangible, decisive encounter. In other words, in such a situation the threatened group must ultimately come to terms with something so utterly complex as to render their subsequent actions and orientation oftentimes counterproductive.

III

Radical nationalism and social revolution are functions of the breakdown of community in a society—resulting in the search for a new, more adequate, community. The dynamic inherent in radical nationalism is an integral part of social revolutions. Hence the paradox! Further, if the society-wide purification through the physical elimination of the corrupting elements of a society is the function of radical nationalism, such collective yearnings to regain the strength and vitality of a society when aroused to a sufficiently exacerbated pitch is oftentimes transformed into social revolution. This is the inadvertent social revolution from the Right: in it, radical nationalism and social revolution produce that explosive mix of subjective mass behavior associated with primitive forces, connected to the notions of territoriality present in all radical nationalism; plus the nonrealistic totalistic-universalistic momentum involved with social revolutions at their onset, that together have the potential for a subsequent society-wide tragedy. Further, social revolution, whether inadvertent or purposeful regardless, is that very situation which the radical nationalist on an immediate level seeks precisely to avoid;¹ even though the quest on the Far Right to reintegrate the troubled community is rooted in the larger-than-life past, in practice radical nationalism opens up the door to an inadvertent social revolution in the very act of searching for an ideal community reminiscent of the past.

A purposeful social revolution on the Far Left that is fully meant must also demand the elimination of the old structures of power, along with those who have held positions of power and privilege in it in the past—mimicking thereby the processes inherent in an eliminative Far Right radical nationalism, despite idealistic underlying premises.²

In short, whether the process of society-wide renewal is approached from the Far Right, or from the Far Left, political extremists come to power in order to do what is necessary; and what is necessary is the elimination of the threat, that is, the opposition! The elimination of the opposition is the function of a centralized State terror bureaucracy in a society.

The ascendant state terror bureaucracy, in becoming pre-eminent as the master bureaucracy, will degenerate society as a result—whether on the Left or on the Right regardless. Que sera sera. And it will degenerate the society under the auspices of an exacerbated radical nationalism. The underlying dynamic of all radical nationalism—Left and Right—is the elimination of all opposition in a society. That is the revolution within the revolution—i.e. a counter revolution—in a social revolution undergoing is the onset of Thermidor. On the Far Left, Thermidor—which means the onset of a radical nationalism—means the end of the idealistic social revolution, and the parallel onset of a radically eliminative terror in a stage of terror. On the Far Right, the onset of Thermidor means pushing an already existing eliminative terror dynamic—there from the beginning—to the point of systematic elimination, which is genocide. Such a dynamic should never be allowed to begin in the first place, as a result. With the collapse of Russian Communism in 1991, social revolutions will come—if it comes—from the Right. Social revolution will come—if it comes—if evolutionary development fails to do its job in a society or in a region. Therefore, they this dynamic on the Far Right must be pre-empted before it takes off on its paradoxical way to genocide.

Book I

A Search For A Method Of Right-Wing

Social Revolution In The Modern World

Chapter I

Mass Society: A Paradoxical Development in Modern Times

Modern Western society developed from a standpoint of individualism. From this Renaissance-derived concept underlying society, a single man is an end-in-himself. The Western individual is an autarkik isolate that incorporates and attempts to maximize all the positive values inherent in society within himself. The individual strives to be self-sufficient as the bottom line of his existence.

The sanctity of the individual is the underlying theme of Western society in modern times. According to Sir Isaiah Berlin in Four Essays on Liberty, anything that displaces the individual as the ultimate value in the West smacks of Fascism and totalitarianism. The French philosopher and essayist Albert Camus agrees. The enemy of Western man is what Camus calls the plague. The plague in political dress for Camus is totalitarianism and political pestilence in any form: Left or Right extremism involving pathological group behavior, in a consequently sick society. For Camus—for this utterly decent and ethical Western man—the political plague is the function of metaphysical abstractions that exclude individual responsibility for one’s actions. According to Paul Johnson, As Sartre moved towards the [Left int the 1950’s], Camus became more of an independent. In a sense he occupied the same position as George Orwell in Britain: he set himself against all authoritarian systems and came to see Stalin as an evil man on the same plane as Hitler. Like Orwell and unlike Sartre he consistently held that people were more important than ideas. De Beauvoir reports that in 1946 he confided in her: ‘What we have in common, you and I, is that individuals count most of all for us. We prefer the concrete to the abstract, people to doctrines. We place friendship above politics.’ [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals].

II

Individuals in a collective—individuals gathering in a group—form a separate entity from the isolate individuals; the group that results is an abstract concept with an existence of its own. The group takes on an invulnerability in the minds of the individuals in it which does not any longer reside in any one individual member’s power or possession or ability to manipulate for individual ends. The group takes on a separate existence of its own, and merely to destroy any number of its members does not mean that the idea of the group itself dies, as long as the remaining members hold on to the idea. The group’s idea is an abstraction bigger than any one of the individual members, with its own ends, not necessarily identical with any one of the member’s ends at any one time, or with many of the group members’ ends even. The political dilemma here then is the: who should take precedence in the value structure of a good society in a multicultural world uniting East and West since the 20th century? Either the individual’s unique worth takes precedence over any abstract group concept, or the abstract group takes precedence over any number of its individual members shy of totality. It is the crux of the matter!

III

The individual in modern Western society is one who concentrates upon himself as the source of meaning for his life and the purpose for his existence. The individual in this conception is the creator of his own worth, the master of his own fate, the source of his own identity. His personal identity is a function of his inner self, idealized in Christian theology as the beautiful soul. The religious notion of the beautiful soul is reconstituted by the French essayist Albert Camus in a secularized form as one who is ethical, liberally informed, truly understanding—i.e., an aware mind—in a mid-twentieth-century context. It is re-interpreted again by the Austrian-born Bruno Bettelheim, in the United States, in the mid-twentieth century (after Bettelheim himself survived a German concentration for two years), in a psychoanalytically informed, existential version of the ‘beautiful soul.’ In this version, the beautiful soul becomes the informed heart. It is now the beautiful soul with an aware mind, but now in addition possessed of that intimate knowledge that comes from the Western individual having survived the ultimate evil in group-oriented mass society, the Nazi concentration camps. Paradoxically for Western culture, the Nazi death camps in its midst was a mass society in Europe based on individuals atomized in the mass, where the life of the individual counted for nothing, and where both the value of the individual and the value of the group is nihilated out of existence in the process.

Chapter II

An Introduction to Cultural Imperialism

and Genocide

In the study, The Idols of the Tribe, Harold Isaacs examines the method behind ‘the individual as a member of a group’. For Isaacs, a fundamental security in the world is a function of a person belonging to some group. The fundamental group from which the individual derives his security is his home in the world, (his House of Muumbi, as it were, to use Isaac’s terminology).

A fundamental security in the world, which one acquires through the group—is then assimilated into his person, into his self. He then proceeds to identify himself through it.

Without a group as the source of one’s basic identity at the core of one’s being, it is an extremely anxiety-producing world for an individual. The result is a perpetual feeling of dread for those who have no home to return to, no tribe to identify with, nor any fundamental group to which they feel that they by definition belong. The certainty of belonging should be the necessary bottom line of one’s existence, according to Isaac’s analysis. Those who choose not to belong, and those who have no right to belong, are ‘outsiders’—those that the Jew Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her own lost European home in the 20th century, called the eternal pariahs of the world.

II

The inalienable first right for any human being, following Isaac’s model, is to belong; this grants the individual his most fundamental and cherished right—the right to his own life with a certain amount of predictable and expectable security from physical and psychological termination without his express permission for it. This is the right to self-determination of an individual in his life.

The predicament of the outsider, who has no right to belong to the group within whose midst he exists, is graphically depicted by that twentieth-century European outsider, the European Jew Franz Kafka in